Advantages And Disadvantages Of Having Business Intelligence On The Cloud

Cloud computing application is an emerging computing technology that uses the internet and central remote servers to maintain data and applications. The impact of cloud computing is broad and deep, it is the sort of technology that companies will need to either embrace or be run over by. Some of the key benefits of cloud computing include rapid implementation, ease of use, and subscription pricing.

Cloud computing has great potential for organizations, and it’s having a profound effect on the business intelligence (BI) also. Business Intelligence helps Companies to process raw data and convert it into Usable Business information. This process still requires significant amount of work on large data warehouses (DW). For most of the traditional companies, the data warehouses and most of the business systems entering data into those data warehouses are on-premise. The impact of cloud computing is broad and deep, it is the sort of technology that companies will need to either embrace or be run over by. Some of the key benefits of cloud computing include rapid implementation, ease of use, and subscription pricing. Organizations thinking of implementing Business Intelligence in the cloud require moving all the data in data warehouses and the associated processes in the cloud. That has its own advantages and challenges:

Advantages:

• Companies with different sizes have different business requirement. Cloud-based software can be easily modified to specific requirement. Even the smaller business enterprises get the capability to tailor make a Business Intelligence system which fits their specific requirements and improve their business processes.

• Initial set up costs to get a traditional IT system functioning can be very high. However cloud-based Business Intelligence solutions can decrease that initial high cost significantly as third party service providers can manage all systems through remote access.

• Temporary use of cloud based software without have to buy a full license is another great benefit. This is known as subscription-based system and this greatly helps the companies to only pay for their organization’s usage.

Challenges:

• A lot of questions still remain unanswered about the security detail of cloud computing platforms as a whole. There is still some concern regarding its data protection ability.

• This is a very new concept and as with any new concept, and there are unforeseen and unexpected glitches. Organizations will have to adjust to them adequately.

• Companies will also have to accept the movement of internal data outside of their internal systems in contrast to an in-house system.

However, if all the pieces are put together properly, it shall be worth it. And what we will get will be very fast Business Intelligence at a fraction of cost with pay-as-you-go subscription model.